Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
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One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
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I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
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Marvelous are the innocent.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
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Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
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Soup is cuisines kindest course
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
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Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
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We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
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A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
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A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
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Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.
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If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
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To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
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It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.
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Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
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The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
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But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
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Thinking is my fighting.
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Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
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When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.